Thursday, November 24, 2016

Yes, it's been an awful year for many of us, my own family at least partly included. But, thankfully, only partly. We still have many blessings. We have each other, we still have our jobs, we still have our extended family and friends, we still have--we think, we hope, we pray--a loving God who mourns the awfulness that we endure and sometimes, just sometimes, "appoint[s] unto them that mourn in Zion...beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness; that they might be called trees of righteousness, the planting of the Lord" (Isaiah 61:3). No planting lasts forever, of course--but for the moment, it's an experience worth being grateful for. So happy Thanksgiving Day, everyone. Remember to count your blessings, one by one by one.

Monday, November 07, 2016

With the exception of one big think piece on our almost-certainly-soon-to-be-POTUS, Hillary Clinton, I've been quiet this presidential election. I think that's because, in the midst of all the outrageousness and gutter talk, all the hysteria and invective, all the anger and angst, I usually haven't felt particularly upset. Engaged, yes--but not distraught. And that feeling of reflective calm has increased over the past week or so--it's not that I feel good about what tomorrow will bring, but I'm not particularly anxious about it either. Here's why, I think.

1) I've never really been convinced by any of the downright-apocalyptic talk we've seen this election. Not that I haven't worried about it; ramping up political disagreements to the point where both sides see the other as a world-historical threat to one's life, freedom, family, faith, future, and civilization itself simply isn't healthy; it makes respectful disagreement, and really any kind of civil discourse that much harder to maintain. But that's the sort of civic unhealthiness we've unfortunately had to endure for a couple of decades now. I can recall (as can many of you) the furious invocations of moral Armageddon from Newt Gingrich and the First Things crowd during Bill Clinton's sordid--but for all that, not too shabby--eight years in office; I can also recall the shoe being on the other foot, and many of my fellow leftists and liberals talking about how George W. Bush's re-election was nothing less than the end of the republic and the beginnings of an imperialist theocracy (which I guess didn't take, somehow). It is now routine for folks on the left to believe that the white Evangelical Protestant minority in our nation wants nothing more than to round up all the Mexicans, Muslims, and gays in America, and force them all into internment camps, and for folks on the right to believe that the college-educated agnostic minority in our nation wants nothing more than to round up all home-schooled children in America, and subject them to sex change operations. I'm sorry, my friends, but that's nonsense, all of it. The government of the United States of America is suffering from several slow-motion catastrophes, in the form of congressional dysfunction, party insularity and corruption, executive overreach, meritocracy-driven divisiveness, and an addiction to kludgey work-around solutions that have little democratic legitimacy and even less rational sense. Neither Clinton nor Trump are the climax of these many bad developments; they're both symptoms, that's all.

2) Which isn't, by the way, some milquetoast, High Broderistic sigh about how "both sides do it." They both do, of course, but the burden of the incivility and anti-democratic fury this year is absolutely on the Trump side. Clinton may well be--even when one tries to be as sympathetic as possible to her record and point of view as possible--an unimaginative, unethical, condescending creature of an elite, statist, progressive political machine, but she's at least serious and predictable, and at least appears to genuinely respect the institutions she wishes to direct toward what she conceives as the public good, while Trump is none of the above, and apparently has no sense of what would be good for the public whatsoever, and probably wouldn't have any interest in achieving such good ends even if he did. Hence the paranoia from so many of my friends about the polls: America's about to elect a sexist, ignorant bully and a hot-tempered Know-Nothing to the presidency! That paranoia is also misplaced; we're not. Sure, data can be read wildly wrong (just ask the Bright Young Things surrounding Romney in 2012, for example), but in all honesty, even if the FBI had indicted Clinton in for something having to do with her endlessly hapless e-mail behavior, as opposed to just letting her off with a warning, she still would be a favorite tomorrow, because being part of the Establishment means, well, knowing how to campaign, which is something Trump clearly never thought he needed to learn.

3) You want specific predictions? Okay, here:

(Yes, the likelihood that Utah will break the half-century dominance of the Electoral College by Republicans and Democrats by giving their vote to Evan McMullin is looking increasingly tiny; still, electoral geekiness and Mormon hope springs eternal. In the end, I think Clinton will end up with an even greater popular vote majority than Obama ever did, and totaling up the EV count tomorrow night, after North Carolina and Florida both go for Clinton--though admittedly, that latter may take a while to be sure about--will be just be a simply matter of running up the numbers.)

4) How will I vote? Writing in Bernie Sanders, I suppose. I'm too fond of my particular mix of republicanism-localism-populism-socialism to symbolically embrace with my single vote a dynastic representative of a liberal establishment which I happen to think gets many policies right, but achieves them in ways mostly wrong. Besides, the only pro-Clinton argument that I've heard which actually reaches past the Electoral College all the way into Trump territory here in south-central Kansas is one that insists Clinton needs a huge popular vote majority to repudiate "Trumpism." But that assumes I see everything about Trumpism as worthy of repudiation--and I don't.

5) Trump was a bad populist, in every sense of the word--but he did become, in his own self-indulgent, irresponsible, probably-never-really-actually-intended way, a voice for anti-financial globalism and anti-bureaucratic elitism, and thus a voice for community empowerment. His attacks on trade agreements and immigration policy were often racist, usually ignorant, and overall both toxic and demagogic--but at least he made those attacks. If it wasn't for Trump, the Republican party wouldn't be what it is today: a party trapped in a much-needed death-struggle over how technology, global capitalism, resource depletion, social and economic inequality, and demographic change are changing what we mean by community and the common good. I would have far preferred that death-struggle take place on the Democratic side, through the Sanders presidential candidacy, because then the possible bad results (and there are always possible bad results) wouldn't nearly as frightening. But you always need to look for silver linings, and so while the results of Clinton's election to the presidency and the Republican party's civil war are unlikely to present anything like what this nation needs, and risks exacerbating a few of our multiple slow-moving catastrophes even further, they are, on the whole, at least slightly better than most of the actually politically viable alternatives.

6) What does the nation need? Well, Charles Marohn has put it well: "We will have a strong and prosperous nation only when we have strong cities, towns, and neighborhoods. That kind of prosperity cannot be imposed or engineered from the top; it must be built slowly from the ground up. Scale our economy to those working at the ground level and we will see a true prosperity emerge from the fear and acrimony that is our national dialog." Which means, far more than the presidency, what I'm watching tomorrow is our state legislative and county commission races here in Kansas: because those are the people I, and everyone else involved in local politics, in citizen initiatives, in fights over food trucks and bike paths and school funding and all the rest, will need on our side, or at least will need to understand better when we oppose them. Is it arguable that Trump or Clinton might be a better prospect for local engagement? Perhaps. But neither president can do anything for thatching together our socio-economic fragments if there aren't citizens connecting with one another, organizing and fighting and celebrating together, in their still-existent communities, on behalf of such a rebuilding project. The localist alternative to federal decline will exist whomever wins tomorrow; while I'm happy about my prediction, I'm even happier--or at least even more unworried--knowing that there will be people whom I can meet with and work with locally, tomorrow and next week and next month and next year, regardless of what happens in the meantime.

Quotes

"Every one of the standards according to which action is condemned demands action. Although the dignity of persons is inevitably violated in action, this dignity would be far less recognized in the world than it is had it not been supported by actions such as the establishment of constitutions and the fighting of wars in defense of human rights. Action must be untruthful, yet religion, science, philosophy, and the arts, the main forms of absolute fidelity to the truth, could not survive were they unsupported by action. Action cannot but be anticommunal in some measure, yet communal relationships would be almost nonexistent without areas of peace and order, which are created by action. We must act hesitantly and regretfully, then, but still we must act."

(Glenn Tinder, The Political Meaning of Christianity: The Prophetic Stance [HarperSanFrancisco, 1991], 215)

"[T]he press was still the last resource of the educated poor who could not be artists and would not be tutors. Any man who was fit for nothing else could write an editorial or a criticism....The press was an inferior pulpit; an anonymous schoolmaster; a cheap boarding-school; but it was still the nearest approach to a career for the literary survivor of a wrecked education."

"Mailer was a Left Conservative. So he had his own point of view. To himself he would suggest that he tried to think in the style of [Karl] Marx in order to attain certain values suggested by Edmund Burke."

(Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night [The New American Library, 1968], 185)

"All those rely on their hands, and each is skillful at his own craft. / Without them a city would have no inhabitants; no settlers or travellers would come to it. / Yet they are not in demand at public discussions, nor do they attain to high office in the assembly. They do not sit on the judge's bench or understand the decisions of the courts. They cannot expound moral or legal principles and are not ready with maxims. / But they maintain the fabric of this world, and the practice of their craft is their prayer."

(Ecclesiasticus (Sirach) 38:31-34, in The Revised English Bible with the Apocrypha [Oxford University Press, 1989])

"The tendency, which is too common in these days, for young men to get a smattering of education and then think themselves unsuited for mechanical or other laborious pursuits is one that should not be allowed to grow up among us...Every one should make it a matter of pride to be a producer, and not a consumer alone."

(Wilford Woodruff, Millennial Star [November 14, 1887], 773)

"We are parts of the world; no one of us is an isolated world-whole. We are human beings, conceived in the body of a mother, and as we stepped into the larger world, we found ourselves immediately knotted to a universe with the thousand bands of our senses, our needs and our drives, from which no speculative reason can separate itself."

"'Business!' cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. 'Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were all my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!'"

(Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol [Candlewick Press, 2006], 35)

"The Master said, 'At fifteen, I set my mind upon learning; at thirty, I took my place in society; at forty, I became free of doubts; at fifty, I understood Heaven's Mandate; at sixty, my ear was attuned; and at seventy, I could follow my heart's desires without overstepping the bounds of propriety.'"

"Lack of experience diminishes our power of taking a comprehensive view of the admitted facts. Hence those who dwell in intimate association with nature and its phenomena grow more and more able to formulate, as the foundations of their theories, principles which admit a wide and coherent development: while those whom devotion to abstract discussions has rendered unobservant of the facts are too ready to dogmatize on the basis of a few observations."

"[God] does not want men to give the Future their hearts, to place their treasure in it. . . . His ideal is a man who, having worked all day for the good of posterity (if that is his vocation), washes his mind of the whole subject, commits the issue to Heaven, and returns at once to the patience or gratitude demanded by the moment that is passing over him."

"Money is simply a tool. We use money as a proxy for our time and labor--our life energy--to acquire things that we cannot (or care not to) procure or produce with our own hands. Beyond that, it has limited actual utility: you can't eat it; if you bury it in the ground, it will not produce a crop to sustain a family; it would make a lousy roof and a poor blanket. To base our understanding of economy simply on money overlooks all other methods of exchange that can empower communities. Equating an economy only with money assumes there are no other means by which we can provide food for our bellies, a roof over our heads and clothing on our backs."

"A scholar's business is to add to what is known. That is all. But it is capable of giving the very greatest satisfaction, because knowledge is good. It does not have to look good or even sound good or even do good. It is good just by being knowledge. And the only thing that makes it knowledge is that it is true. You can't have too much of it and there is no little too little to be worth having. There is truth and falsehood in a comma."

"I believe in democracy. I accept it. I will faithfully serve and defend it. I believe in it because it appears to me the inevitable consequence of what has gone before it. Democracy asserts the fact the masses are now raised to a higher intelligence than formerly. All our civilization aims at this mark. We want to do what we can to help it. I myself want to see the result. I grant that it is an experiment, but it is the only direction society can take that is worth its taking; the only conception of its duty large enough to satisfy its instincts; the only result that is worth an effort or a risk. Every other possible step is backward, and I do not care to repeat the past. I am glad to see society grapple with issues in which no one can afford to be neutral."